Interview: Paul VanderKlay, Very Online Pastor
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 15 December 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you do church in the digital age? Is there such a thing as an atheist? To what extent are our crazy times really unprecedented, and to what extent are they nothing the Church hasn't seen before? These are some of the questions I tackle with my friend Paul VanderKlay, a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, a close observer of Jordan Peterson's rise to fame and the young men who find meaning in his work, and a rather unwitting YouTube sensation.
Subscribe to Paul's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/paulvanderklay
Check out his website: https://paulvanderklay.me/about-2/
Connect with our friends at the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/youngheretics/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Young Herritix Conversations. |
| 0:09.2 | This is our Friday interview series. |
| 0:11.8 | If you're just joining us on the show, first of all, welcome. This is the classical education. You did not know you were missing. And the main way that happens is every Tuesday. I'll put out an hour long episode about some great work or idea or tradition |
| 0:26.3 | that's been handed down through the civilization and nations of the West through |
| 0:32.1 | Athens and Jerusalem and their intellectual inheritance and |
| 0:35.0 | heritage. So that's what the show kind of began as and as these things go it has |
| 0:39.8 | kind of morphed out into this larger empire and one of my favorite parts of it now is these |
| 0:45.4 | Friday conversations where I get to sit down and talk with either friends whom I know or people |
| 0:51.9 | that I've only kind of watched from afar online, people whose work I appreciate, |
| 0:56.4 | somebody that sparked something in me or now increasingly people that you've asked to have on the show people you've requested and so do by the way |
| 1:05.0 | write in if there's anybody you'd like to see I'm fielding those requests and I |
| 1:09.4 | will answer as many of them as I as I possibly can. This time around I'm delighted to be joined by my friend Paul |
| 1:16.4 | Vander clay. So Paul is somebody whom I was introduced to through various |
| 1:22.1 | mutual friends. We ended up doing an event together this year and I just |
| 1:27.9 | was really delighted to be introduced into sometimes he refers to it as this little corner of the internet. |
| 1:35.7 | Paul is and has been for his whole career as I understand it, a pastor in the Christian |
| 1:42.3 | Reformed Church and that's still what he is. He's still a minister of a real life in-person congregation. |
| 1:51.0 | But he's also, and this is how I got to know him, sort of a surrogate pastor or an online pastor for an enormous number of people. |
| 2:01.0 | I think he kind of got his start in the YouTube world by commenting |
| 2:05.9 | observing the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and I think we'll talk today a little bit |
| 2:10.0 | about what Jordan Peterson has meant for the church and what that whole transition and |
| 2:15.8 | change has heralded for people's motion toward religion and to faith. |
... |
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